Heterotopic Heart Transplant

No, this isn’t an x-ray of a massive lower lobe lung fibrosis, what you’re looking at is an x-ray of a patient with 2 hearts as a result of a very rare, but somewhat effective, heterotopic heart transplant procedure. This type of heart transplant is also called “piggy-back” transplant because it uses a donor heart and attaches it to the patients defective heart, creating a synergistic type of treatment instead of a complete change of the patient’s heart. It was more useful back in the 90s because graft-rejection by the body was less common in this type of transplant than the complete heart transplant type and immunosuppression therapy was still experimental. Currently it’s only considered useful for patients with excessive chronic pulmonary hypertension (Increased BP in lungs) and we rely more on complete heart transplant due to the immunosuppression therapy advancements. Science is advancing in fascinating ways ! .